28.03.2022, 23:54
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-15/r.../100908978
Zitat:In theory, Russia was on the right track
Between 2008 and 2012, the Russian military discarded many of its legacy Soviet military structures following its operations in Georgia.
Next, a more profound transformation was undertaken: This included the Russian state armament program to compensate for 20 years of divestment in its armed forces.
It also reorganised its armed forces and built a smaller and more professional permanent force.
The transformation program also placed a high priority on joint exercises, enhanced readiness, improved training and a program to replace conscripts with contracted personnel.
New equipment, new ideas about future war, a more professional force at higher readiness and lessons from recent combat in Syria.
In theory, the combination of these elements, as well as its much larger size than the Ukrainian armed forces, should have given Russia a war-winning combination in Ukraine. What has gone wrong?
Like recent revelations about falsified intelligence on Ukraine, the President of Russia was probably kept in the dark about deficiencies in the Russian military.
If Putin had invested hundreds of billions of dollars in the military over the previous decade, who was going to tell him it wasn't working?
However, experienced Russia observers in the West were saying as early as 2017 that the power of the Russian military was overestimated, it was challenged by overstretch and was technologically backward. These observers have been proved right in the past two weeks.
There is an important lesson here for Western defence planners: They must have informed goals for military effectiveness in the 21st century.
And, if they are surrounded by yes-men and are not transparent with the outcomes of military transformation programs, they will probably get the wrong answers.
A second problem may be that the Russians got the balance of investment in different military services wrong.
US scholar Michael Kofman has written that the overall focus of Russian military development from 2008 to 2014 "was to counter Western advantages in air power … To this end, much of the investment initially did not go towards Russian ground forces".
Getting the balance of investment in land, air, maritime, cyber and information domains wrong can have catastrophic consequences.
Its army has been out-thought and outfought for most of the war. The conduct of Russian information operations has been a spectacular failure compared to their Ukrainian adversaries.
Western defence planners should also take heed of this. There is a trend in some circles in several nations to focus on heavy investments in maritime warfare.
It is useful for manufacturing, and there is a lot of water in the Pacific. But it is conceivable that governments might overinvest in naval forces at the cost of air, land and information operations.
It is hardly useful to sink enemy ships if you cannot then destroy their aircraft or soldiers on the ground.
Gerasimov made much of the lessons from Syria. He has described how Russia had acquired "priceless combat experience in Syria".
Despite this emphasis on Syria, the Russians appear to have taken away many wrong lessons.
The war in Syria was an intervention at the invitation of a host government to suppress the population.
While the Russians did not engage in large-scale ground operations, it ended up being a conflict with many lessons irrelevant to Ukraine.
After two decades of low-level counterinsurgency warfare, Western governments must also be careful about what lessons are taken from these conflicts.
Rarely were Western forces challenged in the air or at sea. And there was never a time when Western forces had to fight on the land, in the air, at sea or in the cyber and information domains all at once.